We left Matteo Tricarico in India, during his Travel For Aid odissey across Asia into Europe…after a short stint in Dubai, Matteo is now in Iran, a fascinating country full of culture, deserts and very hospitable people… his Iranian adventures continue, and the following is the chronicle as penned down by Matteo himself…

On April 27, I continued northwards on National Highway 55 until Deh Bid, where I slept in my tent nearby one of the many roadblocks that the police set along the main roads of the country. The police officers stop almost everybody, and in that “almost” I include myself since I have never been stopped till now. The officers get mostly on line coaches, asking for documents to those whose face looks suspicious and I saw people detained for further controls while the bus left them behind. Here the altitude is 2400 metres and that was the coldest night since I descended the Himalayan peaks last December. The next morning, I was awoken by an unbearable stench that, although I did not take a bath for three days, could not come from me! Emerging from the igloo, I found myself immersed in a lake of bleating goats, with the two shepherds who were watching closely the technical characteristics of the bicycle. Between the smelling sheep and the biting cold, which exacerbated throughout the day despite the sun shine, I continued to ride north on the plateau, that maintains an altitude of around the 2100 metres, intrigued by the Zagros Mountains to my right with the 3943 metres Bel Kuh towering peak covered in snow. A few kilometres before Surmagh, I turned right on the crossroad to Yazd leading east. The land drops down to 1500 metres and the Mediterranean scrub, protagonist in the last 400 kilometres, suddenly gives way to sparse thorny shrubs of the desert, which in turn gradually disappear leaving the land free from almost any forms of vegetation. Sometimes, for a full hour, I found myself to be the only human being, perhaps the only living creature!, within a radius of ten kilometres before being reached and overtaken by a car or a truck. Darkness fell, and I camped between a few green bushes just over one meter high, that for some mystery of nature, could survive in such a total dryness. The next morning, putting my head out of the tent, I noticed something moving at the bushes foot. They were small animals like mice, I think rodents, colour sand-mustard-brown, that in different sizes came out of the holes at the base of the vegetation and cautiously wandered a few metres from me. I observed them for a good half hour, without them noticing my presence, with the young ones playing with each other, while the adults searched for food in that desolate habitat. When I revealed my presence, standing up on my feet, the puppies immediately ran to burrow, followed immediately by their parents who stayed a few moments on the lookout and disappeared completely underground after I moved a couple of steps towards the holes.

At the intersection of Deh-e Shir, I must have taken a wrong turn and instead of following the direct way to Taft, I arrived to Mehriz lengthening my way of about fifty kilometres. This morning I reached Yazd, a city that can claim of having been continuously inhabited for the last 7000 years, and where I will dwell for a few days before heading north-east towards the real desert.

Since in these past two years my life has been really public, I will tell you about a little “romance” that I am living. In Shiraz, I received a call from an Iranian girl that angrily accused me of using the phone number she lost in a taxi in Tehran! Of course, I explained to her that I regularly bought the SIM in Bandar-e Abbas and everything became clear when I recited the number finding out that between the two numbers there was a figure of difference and that she dialled it incorrectly. An exchange of text messages followed that conversation in which she curiously asked who I was, where I was going, and so on. Since then I spent an hour almost every day talking on the phone with Leila, as the Princess of Star Wars, and we arranged to meet on my arrival in the capital. I hope not to get into trouble for a woman, as it would not be the first time… frankly, I hope it won’t also be the last …